Current projects

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The project Medieval Serbian Charters Action (MeSeCA) – Towards a Digital Edition of the Royal Charters of Medieval Serbia aims at improvement of substantial, technical and software aspects of the digital database of Serbian medieval charters named Diplomatarium Serbicum Digitale (DSD) at the Department of Digital Humanities of the Graz University. The main objectives are to complete the database material, containing of edited document texts, metadata and images, and to conclude its transformation into a scholarly digital edition according to the current standards of Digital humanities.

This interdisciplinary research project develops innovative methods for reconstructing historical land use in the Austrian region of Styria between 1820 and 1870. For the first time, the project transfers Circle Diagram Models (CDMs), originally developed for tropical regions in Southeast Asia, to the Central European context, using state-of-the-art Digital Humanities techniques.

Research objectives: The project pursues three main goals: (1) the adaptation and application of CDMs for land use in Styria, (2) the integration of machine learning methods for the systematic analysis of archival material and cadastral maps, and (3) the detailed analysis of early industrial change in the region. Three points in time are examined: 1820 (completion of the first cadastral maps), 1848 (abolition of serfdom), and 1870 (conclusion of cadastral renewal).

Methodology: The project combines traditional historical archival research with innovative digital analysis methods. Extensive datasets from the Austrian State Archives, the Styrian Provincial Archives, and digital repositories are evaluated using machine learning algorithms. Collaboration with the Digital Humanities department at the University of Graz enables the automated segmentation of cadastral maps and the extraction of structured data from historical documents.

Scholarly relevance: The project addresses a central challenge in Earth system research: the lack of reliable data on historical human–environment interactions. While global land-use models often fail because they assume cultural homogeneity, CDMs offer a regionalized approach that takes local conditions into account. Styria is an ideal study area, as industrial developments unfolded unevenly here – ranging from subsistence-oriented agriculture to early industrialization.

Innovation: For the first time, Digital Humanities methods are systematically integrated into the development of CDMs. The automated analysis of historical cadastral maps and statistical tables using machine learning significantly accelerates labour-intensive data collection. At the same time, the project tests the transferability of CDM methodology—originally developed for the Global South—to data-rich European contexts.

Expected results: The project will generate detailed land-use models for different “lifestyles” (time- and place-specific land-use patterns) in Styria. These will be visualized as circle diagrams and will enable quantitative comparisons between different points in time and regions. The results will contribute to a better understanding of early industrial transformation processes and will demonstrate the scalability of the CDM methodology.

Societal relevance: In addition to its scientific contribution, the project will inform local communities about the environmental and land-use history of their region. Public presentations and a dedicated website will make the research findings accessible. The methods developed may also be of interest to agronomists and land-use planners.

The EMARCH-ON-DIGIT project aims to explore the ontology of memory and archive in the context of digital preservation and representation of 20th-century wars in Southeast Europe (SEE). It focuses on understanding how institutionalized digital archiving practices influence collective memory and the policies of remembering and forgetting in the digital age. This topic is of major importance as the region's turbulent history in the past century significantly shapes its collective memory, yet the digital archiving practices remain unexplored and not critically investigated from both national and international perspectives. This research addresses the underexplored area and a critical gap within digital memory studies, particularly concerning how institutionalized cultural heritage digital archiving practices in the SEE countries influence collective memory and institutional policies of remembering and forgetting within the broader Europeanization context. Additionally, the project explores the alignment of national digital archives with broader European practices and policies, contributing to the discourse on transnational identity and unity and providing insights into the diversity and inclusivity of digital cultural memory The project will explore the impact of digital archiving on the cultural memory of Southeast Europe, particularly regarding the wars of the 20th century. These conflicts have profoundly influenced collective memory and identity. Given that a quarter-century has passed since the end of the Yugoslav wars, understanding how these events are digitally remembered is critical. Although extensive research has been conducted on war memory and its impact on collective identity and remembering in the SEE region (West 2016; Bădescu 2019; Haxhiaj 2022), there is a notable gap in studies on digital memory in relation to war legacies in SEE (Božović, Trifunović, Bošković 2014). 

A study on philology, history and culture based on a digital edition of the treatises

  • Funded by: EU Horizon Europe ERC STARTING-GRANT grant agreement No 101039572
  • Duration: 01.09.2022 - 30.08.2027
  • Project partners: Department of Medieval Studies; Austrian Academy of Sciences
  • Project contact: PI Michaela Wiesinger (michaela.wiesinger(at)oeaw.ac.at)
  • Planned publication: 2026

How did the practice of arithmetic develop and spread during the transition from medieval to modern times? The ERC-Project ARITHMETIC (PI Michaela Wiesinger, ÖAW) ARITHMETIC examines handwritten German arithmetic treatises from their first appearance around 1400 until the time when printed arithmetic books became readily available in the early 16th century. Numerous tracts will be transcribed, digitally processed, and analyzed from historical, literary, and linguistic perspectives. This research aims to develop a new understanding of how arithmetical knowledge and practices of arithmetic changed in late medieval Europe and how an abstract and scientific language emerged in the German vernacular.

Glosses are fingerprints of the society in which texts were composed, copied, and read. Most importantly, they play a much more significant role than previous research has acknowledged and offer insights about the multilingual and multi-ethnic environment of medieval manuscript and text production the principal texts cannot: they are first-hand testimonies of the close linguistic and cultural connections between Insular Celtic (Old Breton, Old Irish, Old Welsh) and Latin speakers. GLOSSIT researches these contacts combining methods of comparative philology and historical linguistics, digital humanities (handwritten text recognition, network analysis, natural language processing), (cultural) history, and biological computation (applying DNA-sequence alignment methods to glosses).

Project manager: Georg Vogeler

In the web portal "Monasterium.net", you can find stories about fugitive robber barons, heroic deeds, aiding and abetting flight or religious division of families with a keyword search or a few mouse clicks. However, the portal with its more than 600,000 medieval and early modern documents is also a testimony to the uniformity and diversity of legal culture in Europe. In order to properly classify these stories, you need to know what people in the past wanted to record in documents, how they did it and what they used them for.

Diplomatics" is the academic discipline dedicated to these questions - and it has been around for over 350 years. However, the established methods are not sufficient to deal with the large number of documents that have been created in Europe since the 13th century. The "From Digital to Distant Diplomatics" project will therefore bring diplomatics into the digital present. It aims to enable anyone interested in medieval and early modern documents to make use of the latest developments in data science and artificial intelligence when dealing with these documents.

The computers need lots of examples to "learn" - and they need people to interpret the suggestions they make. That's why an environment is needed in which humans and machines work together: People contribute their creativity and the ability to "understand" other people, as well as to draw meaningful insights from their experience with objects, to tell something about the past. The machine can quickly process large amounts of data and both apply rules and learn new rules. The DiDip project will develop such a "virtual research environment".

The project will test the usefulness of the research environment by investigating European trends and regional differences in the design and use of 14th and 15th century charters. What influence did pan-European political institutions such as the Roman Church have on regional documentary practice? How did local and regional notarization practices react to the spread of Roman law among the legal thinkers of Europe? How do the two widespread authentication practices, by seal and by notarial signature, relate to each other? The project team will answer these questions by using computer vision and machine language processing to identify trends, breaks, standardizations and diversifications. The observations made on the digital representations of the documents will be related to major European events such as the Western Schism (1378-1417) or the Great Plague (1348/49) and the ensuing economic crisis.

The project is funded by the ERC with an Advanced Grant (duration 2022-2026).

International

The EMHo project focuses on digitising and analysing a 17th-century Chinese-Spanish dictionary, "Bocabulario de lengua sangleya por las letraz de el A.B.C." Authored by an anonymous Spanish missionary, this manuscript offers insight into the Southern Min language, also known as Hokkien, as utilised by Chinese immigrants in early Manila.

We aim to make this historical document openly accessible as a digital edition. This includes digital facsimiles, a diplomatic as well as critical transcription, and an English translation, augmented with linguistic annotations including tone, and Chinese characters. These enrichments aim to make the work beneficial for a wider linguistic audience.

The endeavour entails examining the manuscript through three lenses: language history, missionary linguistics, and historical sociolinguistics. We seek to understand the status of Early Manila Hokkien, the linguistic methods of the missionaries, and the socio-historical context of early Chinese migration and Spanish colonialism in Manila.

Utilising the Text Encoding Initiative standard, the project emphasises careful transcription and annotation, particularly of linguistic and tonal features. The approach combines transcription and editing with historical sociolinguistic methods and comparison with contemporary sources.

Through this endeavour, we aim to contribute to the digital documentation and open-access publication of non-European language resources and offer new insights into Chinese-Spanish lexicography and the history of the Chinese language, with a particular focus on marginalised groups.

National

  • In cooperation with the Department of Linguistics, University of Graz
  • Funding: FWF
  • Duration: 2026-2029
  • Project contact: Elisabeth Steiner, Thea Schaaf

The Department of Digital Humanities and the Department of Linguistics jointly develop and maintain the Hugo Schuchardt Archive (HSA), a digital collection of the linguist's correspondence, publications, manuscripts, and private library. The Genesis of Knowledge project expands this previous work to investigate Schuchardt's approach towards empirical research exemplified by his work as a leader in Creole language studies. Manuscripts from this field will be edited and interlinked with the letters and other material to trace his pioneering methodology, which he also transferred to other fields of study.

Research context: Our proposal is based on the observation that, whilst today’s Styria has a relatively new road and rail network that reflects Austria’s current political and administrative circumstances, in the past (from Roman times right up to the 19th century) there existed an ancient network of roads that structured and organised transport and mobility within and through this region for centuries. Key information about this ancient road network can be gleaned from the Franziszeischer Kataster dating from the 1820s. Although human construction activity from the late 19th century onwards has significantly altered this network and largely overlaid it, a substantial part of it has remained visible to the expert eye in aerial photographs, satellite imagery and LiDAR data. Hypotheses and Objectives The Franziszeischer Kataster, compiled in Styria between 1820 and 1825, contains highly detailed information on the entire transport infrastructure of the early 19th century. Our research hypothesis is that the information in the cadastre provides details of the majority of the Styrian road network between Roman times and the early 19th century. Our aim is to extract this information from the cadastre and train an AI model (PATHFINDER) to recognise traces of historical roads in large volumes of research data, namely aerial and satellite imagery. PATHFINDER will then be further developed into PATHMAKER, which will be able to apply the logic of historical road construction to complete our knowledge of historical transport infrastructure for entire regions. Approach We plan to automate the extraction of information stored in the Franziszeischer Kataster in order to use this data to train suitable machine learning and deep learning algorithms, with the aim of building a tool that a.) can recognise historical road sections within large volumes of research image data, and b.) predict road alignments and complete road networks. The model can also be deployed outside the region in which it was initially trained. Innovation We will deliver a number of highly relevant outcomes: Firstly, we will provide the research community of historians and archaeologists with a complete and detailed map (GIS layer) of Styrian road infrastructure in the early 19th century; secondly, we will provide a model for archaeological surveying and remote sensing, and thirdly, we are developing a tool that can easily be used outside the region as well. Researchers involved PI Dr Wolfgang Göderle is a historian with a background in engineering and has already successfully led the previous research project TAI 591G, in which tools were developed that can be reused in MoST. Dr Iris Koch is an archaeologist with a strong connection to Styrian transport infrastructure and extensive experience in this field. Assoc. Prof. Dr Roman Kern from Graz University of Technology is a computer and data scientist with extensive experience in this field and will be responsible for the technical challenges posed by MoST.

  • In cooperation with the Department of Classics, University of Graz
  • Funding: Countries (including their foundations and institutions)
  • Duration: 01.12.2026-30.11.2027
  • PI: Matthias Scholler
  • Project collaborator: Georg Vogeler

PROVINCIA makes the Roman Imperial period digitally accessible in new ways. Building on the printed Prosopographia Imperii Romani, the project develops a research database that maps the careers, offices, and networks of Roman elites as a knowledge graph.

By bringing together Ancient History and Artificial Intelligence, PROVINCIA explores whether AI, working on a historically curated dataset, can reveal new patterns in administration, career trajectories, and social relationships.

 

In the late 12th century, Peter of Poitiers (c. 1130–1205) compiled a diagrammatic synopsis of biblical history, generally known as the *Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi*. It is of paramount importance for the visual representation of history, as it is the first historical synopsis to present universal history in a visual form. The complex interrelationships between images and text in this work pose a challenge for both traditional and modern (digital) editorial methods. The project will produce a first digital edition of the work, thereby breaking new methodological ground in the field of critical digital editing of complex diagrammatic synopses and paving the way for the editing of other works with similarly complex structures.

Peter of Poitiers conceived the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi in Paris in the late 12th century, a time of intellectual awakening. Designed in the form of a genealogical graphic, the work offers a concise overview of biblical history from Adam to Christ, representing all of Christ’s direct ancestors as well as the successions of dynasties of rulers, priests, and prophets. Like a time-map, it thus produces a synoptic image of diachronic and synchronic relationships between persons and events.

This graphically innovative work spread rapidly throughout the Latin West, both on rolls and in codices (in the latter usually as a work transmitted alongside other texts). To date, the project has identified more than 320 manuscripts (including many previously unknown). In Phase I, the enormous breadth and diversity of the transmission was recorded in a database, allowing a precise picture of the contexts of transmission as well as of the work’s variants to emerge. Particularly important are a “short” and an “interpolated” version of the text, which, however, appear in highly heterogeneous graphic and visual forms, within which initial groups of variance have been identified.

The earlier, “short” version has been made accessible through a visual edition (a navigable graph with two additional presentation layers for coherent sections and individual elements), a critical text, and a scholarly commentary on graphic structures, exegetical diagrams, and the historical and intellectual context. All project results are made available through an online portal.

On this basis, Phase II will consider the Compendium historiae as a “living work” which, in its wide-ranging spatial and temporal reception, exhibits an enormous breadth of variation in its graphic structure, texts, diagrams and illustrations, and, finally, in its iconographic program. This also brings into view the functions of the work for different audiences, as well as its influence and impact.

We will focus on four goals:
(1) to uncover textual dimensions of referentiality (sources, persons, places) and to edit the “texts in motion” by means of an alternative navigation graph and readings of the interpolations;
(2) to explore and art-historically comment on the rich variety of the iconographic repertoire that unfolds from the 13th century onwards (following the largely image-less early copies);
(3) to investigate the relationships between the adaptations and transformations of the work and its functions and intended audiences;
(4) to deepen, from multiple perspectives, the stemmatological analysis of textual and graphic variance, employing innovative methods of automated text and layout recognition and capturing the work’s structures through a formalized representation of graph variance.

Despite the overall increase in interest, research into Giuseppe Tartini remains largely focused on music-philological and performance-related aspects of his violin works, as well as on his activities as a music theorist. Whilst Tartini’s ‘School of Nations’, with its more than 100 pupils, is well known, a more in-depth contextualisation of his teaching activities within 18th-century Europe has yet to be undertaken – as has the development of a comprehensive approach to understanding teacher–pupil relationships within professional environments that sometimes diverged significantly depending on the linguistic region or musical landscape. The project is based on the thesis that Tartini’s ‘School’ played a pioneering role in shaping a modern concept of musical education. His pupils were offered a multifaceted educational programme designed to ensure the best possible integration into professional musical life. This raises the question of the extent to which the ‘school’ defined itself as an instrumental school. An examination of the Europe-wide networks of Tartini’s pupils, their integration into the music markets, and the dissemination of their musical works and treatises will reveal both the didactic traditions of the ‘school’ and its enormous impact on court orchestras and musical centres. By reconstructing the ‘school’ in the context of patronage, the reception of Tartini’s didactic materials, and the Europe-wide dissemination of Tartini-related manuscripts and prints, the research team will address three key areas. These will be brought together on a digital platform featuring prosopographical data from archival research, musical corpora of the pupils, and a digital edition of Tartini’s pedagogical writings. Based on a ‘factoid’ data model enriched with Linked Open Data, the pupils’ career paths can be analysed, musical genres and motifs compared with one another, and networks or pathways of dissemination of musical knowledge and the Scuola traced. This will result not only in a digital resource on a specific ‘school’ or a particular style of training and tradition in violin playing, but also in a cosmopolitan cartography. On this basis, nationally defined historiographies of an ‘Italian’ or ‘German’ musical tradition can be further deconstructed. Alongside collaborative partners from the fields of digital humanities (the Graz Humanities Asset Management System GAMS, Transkribus, RISM), the project team comprises six established music researchers with complementary research experience, language skills and networks from five different countries (Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia). The planned project outputs include the digital platform, international workshops, academically informed concert-talks, two English-language publications and a joint university course.
 

The research project “Running the Brenner Road: Custom Duties & Tolls in the 18th Century” examines the transalpine movement of goods and the maintenance of the important Brenner route in the 18th century. The Brenner Pass was one of the most important north-south trade routes in Europe and, due to its relatively low altitude of 1,370 metres, could be traversed by carts all year round. The project focuses on two main aspects: 1. **Trade, customs duties and tolls**: By analysing customs registers from the town of Klausen/Chiusa, the project documents the daily, seasonal and annual transport of goods along the Brenner Route. The sources provide information on the types of goods, quantities transported, the number of packhorses and draught horses, as well as the customs duties and tolls levied. 2. **Transport and infrastructure**: The project investigates how the Brenner Route, as a transalpine link, was maintained. Particular attention is paid to the maintenance of roads and bridges in an alpine landscape characterised by extreme weather conditions, as well as to the organisation and financing of this work. The research is based on previously untapped customs registers from the Diocesan Archive of Brixen, which have recently been made accessible. These registers provide a complete series of data for the entire Brenner Route in the 18th century and contain not only information on the goods transported but also detailed records of infrastructure measures and their financing. The project combines quantitative and qualitative research approaches. Digital methods are used to make the historical documents machine-readable and to transfer them into a research database. This database will later be made available as an open-access resource for further research. The study is of particular significance as it closes the research gap regarding land transport, whereas research to date has primarily focused on sea and river transport. It also provides insights into the daily struggle with nature and links man-made materiality, everyday transport practices and administrative processes. Furthermore, the project contributes to an integrative approach that focuses on European transcontinental long-distance trade and thereby challenges the notion of ‘globalised peripheries’ by demonstrating that Atlantic trade cannot be conceived of independently of land and river routes. Methodologically, the project combines approaches from economic and social history with new perspectives on infrastructure and materiality. It regards customs posts, roads and bridges both as physical and material sites and as empirical spaces in which situated actions took place, as well as often contested legal spaces.

Wider research context: The project is based on the results of the international research project Exil:Trans (2019–2022) that investigated the life and work of translators in exile (1933–1945). Post-Exil:Trans consequently focuses on the post-exile experiences of these translators up until 1960, their translatorial entanglements and the post-war fate of texts translated in exile. The project considers exiled translators who stayed in their country of exile after 1945, those who returned to the German speaking countries and those who moved to a third country. The main research context is constituted by scientific, literary, and pragmatic translation practices in and in relation to the early post-war GSA region. This particularly concerns translation policies of the occupying powers, translatorial aspects of the post-war book market transformation, as well as the knowledge transfer “into” the newly formed post-war societies via scholarly translation. Objectives: Post-Exil:Trans starts from the finding of the predecessor project that the experience of exile has generated a discernible translational dynamic in different areas of the literary and academic field. It aims to explore the impact of these phenomena in the post-exile period, i. e. of exiled translators, of their ties to other actors and institutions in the GSA region, and of their products, thus mapping out the constitution of the post-war societies from the perspective of translation history. Approach/methods: The project is rooted in the field of Translation History and combines approaches presently pursued in this sub-discipline of Translation Studies: biographical research on translators as agents and research on translation policy. Additionally, to avoid a narrow nation-centered view a transcultural perspective is applied. Post-Exil:Trans has a strong digital component, with substantial infrastructural continuity to the previous project Exil:Trans. Beside dissemination of research results in open access publications we continue to aggregate biographical and bibliographical data on translators in freely accessible and sustainable online databases (the German encyclopaedia of translators Germersheimer Übersetzerlexikon UeLEX and the Austrian bibliographical database of translations DLBT) as well as in the project's own biographical database Exil:Trans, thus ensuring long-term accessibility. Biographical data are also presented and visualized with the help of Digital Humanities tools. Level of originality / innovation: Post-Exil:Trans aims at producing research results relevant for various disciplines, but also at advancing Translation Theory and History, by critically examining the concept of target culture. With research on translatorial continuities and ruptures occurred in the post-war years, it also will contribute to the general historiography of this period. Primary researchers involved: Project lead: Rafael Schögler (Univ. of Graz); principal investigators: Irene Weber-Henking (Univ. of Lausanne), Andreas F. Kelletat (Univ. of Mainz).

In collaboration with the Institute of Computer and Data Science at Graz University of Technology and the Institute of History at the University of Vienna, the ‘Unlocking the Schematismus’ project will use machine learning techniques to extract the personal data and information on organisations and structures contained in the ‘Hof- und Staatshandbuch’ (Schematismus) of the Habsburg Monarchy, published between 1702 and 1918, and convert it into a suitable knowledge representation for subsequent analysis.

  • Funded by: ÖAW
  • Duration: 01.09.2025 - 29.02.2028
  • Principal investigator: Johannes Laroche

The changing role of writing in Europe, observable at the latest from the 12th century onwards, and the associated sharp increase in the production of written records over the course of the late Middle Ages constitute one of the key social developments of this period. In the territory of present-day Austria, a practice that at the beginning of the 13th century was still restricted to the clergy and the high nobility developed, over the following centuries, into a practice that by the early 16th century affected all parts of the population – “pragmatic literacy” had reached every level of society.

For more than 30 years, the study of documents with regard to their creation, use, and storage has been among the central questions of medieval studies and has opened up new perspectives for the historical auxiliary sciences. The digital methods that have emerged in medieval research in recent years have proven to be the key to managing the extensive late medieval corpus of sources. Medieval towns provided particularly fertile ground for the spread of literacy. Parallel to the process of textualization, a dense network of small towns developed in the territory of present-day Austria – settlements that have increasingly attracted the interest of urban history research in recent years.

In these urban settlements, too, we find a close interweaving of very different forms of community: ecclesiastical institutions ranging from parishes to monasteries or monastic reading courts; civic institutions such as the town council or the municipal hospital; representatives of the territorial prince; a Jewish community; nobles residing in the town; and the large majority of the non-burgher urban population all lived here and were entwined through numerous forms of community: citizenship, religious confraternities, neighbourhood, kinship, economic relations, etc. We know that literacy spread rapidly in this context – but how exactly did this process unfold within the different social strata?

The present dissertation project examines the two closely interconnected towns of Krems and Stein as a setting for the spread of literacy in urban space, with a particular focus on the production of charters. The aim is not only to investigate the charter practices of a single institution, such as the town council, a parish, or a monastery, but, insofar as the surviving sources allow, to study the development of charter production in the entire town and beyond its city walls in the surrounding area.

The project proceeds from the assumption that the spread of literacy and thus of charter production did not occur in isolation within individual institutions. Rather, there existed numerous interconnections between the various producers of charters; the extensive and specialized knowledge concerning the formulation, manufacture, and redaction of charters was shared, disseminated, and imitated. The task is to identify individual places or persons within – and possibly also outside – the town as centres of charter production, to understand the dissemination of charter practices within the complex mesh of communities that constituted the “town,” and to describe the development of this category of sources.

With the CLARIAH-AT small project grant, the publication of the hyperdiplomatic transcription as data on the Hyper edition portal is to be made possible.

This three-day technical hackathon brings together 12 specialists from the fields of machine learning, software engineering and the digital humanities to develop innovative similarity search solutions for cultural heritage collections. Unlike typical workshops, this event focuses on producing concrete results: working prototypes and open-source implementations that bridge the critical gap in multimodal search capabilities for cultural heritage data. Technical Objectives The hackathon addresses multimodal cultural heritage data by developing techniques to compare different sources across text, images and metadata. Key areas of focus include the evaluation and optimisation of similarity search algorithms for computational efficiency, as well as the exploration of flexible client/server architectures with an emphasis on client-side implementations. Participants will work with real-world data from Austrian digital humanities repositories to embed innovations in practical applications. Structure and Participants The event spans 3 days (evening arrival + 2 full working days) with 5–6 pre-identified technical specialists and the remaining places filled through a competitive selection process from within the CLARIAH consortium. The format combines collaborative phases for architectural design with specialised development work in skill-based pairs, and ensures regular integration points to maintain module compatibility. Expected outcomes Immediate outcomes include a functional prototype for client-side multimodal similarity search, an open-source reference implementation with documentation, and a draft position paper for submission to technical journals. Long-term objectives include integration into existing cultural heritage platforms, laying the foundations for future funding opportunities, and the development of full research publications. Budget and Timeline The €5,000 CLARIAH grant covers travel, accommodation, meals and materials, supplemented by in-kind contributions such as the venue, GPU resources and staff support. Preparations will begin six months before the event, whilst public release and paper development will commence one month after the hackathon. This initiative directly supports CLARIAH-AT’s strategic priorities by strengthening digital infrastructure, building technical capacity and promoting interoperability between cultural heritage repositories, whilst establishing sustainable, reusable frameworks for next-generation search capabilities.

The project is dedicated to the digitisation and structured cataloguing of the 1929 catalogue of Ludwig Achim and Bettina von Arnim’s private library. At its heart lies a catalogue that has not previously been available in digital form; it contains not only bibliographical details but also documents the original location of each individual book on the shelves at Wiepersdorf Castle. This extraordinary dual organisational structure provides nuanced insights into historical architectures of knowledge and reading practices.

Medieval account books allow very diverse insights, into the everyday life of the monks as well as into the so-called "great" history. And last but not least, the economic affairs of a monastery are of course also extensively documented in these sources. The significance and source value of these texts is therefore very high. In addition, account books often allow insights that would otherwise be denied. Often - unintentionally and therefore all the more valuable - events and occurrences were documented that would otherwise be missing from the rest of the written tradition.

Aldersbach can be considered an ideal example of a Bavarian Cistercian monastery during the 15th century. Although the history of this monastery itself is comparatively poorly researched, the good tradition of the accounts in the 15th century itself, as well as the fact that Aldersbach, with around 80 servants, was a comparatively average religious community, which existed in comparable size hundreds of times throughout Europe, make the Lower Bavarian Cistercian monastery appear almost prototypical. (BL) Medieval accounts are a source whose edition requires both palaeographic and philological precision as well as highly structured data representation in at least tabular form: Without "close reading" of the source to document its edits (deletions and insertions), the tabular representation of the accounts cannot be reliable. The different questions that can be asked of the source additionally demands that the information in the accounts can be easily filtered and aggregated.

  • Funded by: FWF
  • Duration: 01.03.2023 - 28.02.2027
  • Project staff: Richard Hadden PhD, Dr. Marcella Tambuscio, BA.MA. Suzana Sagadin
  • Project homepage: https://managing-maximilian.net

The SFB will research the prosopographical networks around Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) from political, cultural, literary and artistic points of view. It will create a prosopographical database and investigate the relationships of the individuals documented in this database. The DH subproject builds on the current state of digital prosopography for the late Middle Ages. The project will build the necessary data models, tools, and infrastructure for the collection and dissemination of the digital data created by the other subprojects. It will use the collected data for innovative DH research in modeling tacit knowledge and in applying advanced network science techniques (temporal graphs, network patterns).

The theater chronicles of the ballet master Philipp Gumpenhuber document the cultural activities of the Viennese court - a center of European social and cultural life - in the years 1758 to 1763. The digital edition of the theater chronicles aims to provide new insights into the complex musical and socio-cultural life at the Viennese court by encoding the texts in TEI/XML and extracting an RDF database directly from them to reflect the “performative turn” in musicology. The digital edition thus not only processes the source using traditional philological methods, but also combines the transcription with a database approach that corresponds to the concept of the “assertive edition”. The project involves the development of a data model that focuses mainly on the modeling of events (and in terms of performing arts ontologies) and is able to deal with different circumstances, such as probabilities and changes between different performances. GuDiE aims to bring together separate volumes of surviving sources and expand research opportunities through a digital platform that facilitates broad access to one of the most important resources on Viennese theater life. A wide range of visualization options will also be offered, such as a calendar view.